Alabama governor George Wallace (1919–1998) led the political opposition to the civil rights movement in the United States, running for president three times on a platform of maintaining racial segregation in the South. The depth of Wallace’s support was so great that he swept the Deep South in the election of 1968. Despite Wallace’s bigoted views on blacks, he remained a perennial force in Alabama politics and finished his last term as governor in 1987.
A lifelong Democrat, Wallace entered politics when the South was still a stronghold for the party. With the backing of the Ku Klux Klan, a potent influence in state politics, he won his first election as governor of Alabama in 1962. In the election, he promised to “stand up for Alabama” by confronting federal efforts to force the state’s schools to accept blacks. Wallace’s first appearance in the national limelight came several months later, on June 11, 1963, when he infamously followed through on a promise to “stand in the schoolhouse door” in an unsuccessful effort to prevent African-American students Vivian Malone (1942–2005) and James Hood (1945–) from enrolling at the all-white University of Alabama.
When Wallace ran for president in 1968 on his newly invented American Independent Party ticket, he was universally scorned by the mainstream American political establishment. But he received national support, polling well even in pockets of the North where some white voters were upset by federal court orders to bus black students into their high schools. He was elected governor of Alabama again in 1970.
During his 1972 presidential run, Wallace entered the Democratic primaries rather than pursue another third-party run. After polling well in early contests, he was shot in an assassination attempt that paralyzed Wallace’s legs and derailed his candidacy. But he was elected governor of Alabama in 1974. Wallace ran for president one last time, in 1976, but pulled out of the race and endorsed fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter (1924–).
By the mid-1970s, segregation was fading into history, vanished from the schools and lunch counters of Dixie and repudiated by the rising generation of Southern leaders like Carter. Wallace, the last of a breed of white Southern politicians, eventually apologized for his support of segregation.
1. Wallace’s running mate in the 1968 election was retired Air Force general and nuclear weapons enthusiast Curtis LeMay (1906–1990), famous for his role in the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II (1939–1945) and the inspiration for the character Buck Turgidson in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove.
2. Wallace may be most familiar to Americans born after 1970 as a prominent character in the 1994 movie Forrest Gump. In the movie, actor Tom Hanks is digitally inserted into the famous videotape of Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door.
3. Wallace’s shooter, Maryland truck driver Arthur Bremer (1950–), was convicted in Maryland and given a sixty-three-year jail sentence.
In 1959, a guerilla fighter named Fidel Castro (1926–) overthrew the dictatorial government on the island nation of Cuba. The country’s loathed ex-leader, Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973), fled to Europe. Castro and his rebels, including the famed revolutionary Che Guevara (1928–1967), promised they would hold free, democratic elections on the island.
At first, the American administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) welcomed Batista’s overthrow. A few months after taking power, Castro visited Washington, DC, for a long chat with Vice President Richard Nixon (1913–1994), who was impressed by the Cuban leader’s charisma.
However, within months, Eisenhower soured on Castro and authorized a secret CIA program to undermine Cuba’s new government. At the same time, Castro increasingly embraced communist-tinged rhetoric and policies. In late 1959, he decided to eliminate private property in Cuba. The Soviet Union began actively supporting Castro in 1960. To date, the free elections Castro promised have not been held.
Eisenhower’s successor in the White House, John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), reauthorized the covert anti-Castro efforts after he took office in 1961. The plan hatched by the CIA called for training and equipping a group of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and drive Castro out of power.
On April 17, 1961, the invasion force landed at a beach on the southern coast of Cuba known as Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. Despite months of CIA training, the invasion quickly turned into a debacle. Pummeled by the well-prepared Cuban defenders, few of the ships carrying the invasion force were even able to make land.
The Bay of Pigs was a national embarrassment for the United States. American diplomats initially denied a role in the failed raid, but on April 21, Kennedy went on national television to accept responsibility for the fiasco. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. What matters,” Kennedy said, is that “I am the responsible officer of the government.”
The invasion was a serious setback for the United States. American hostility convinced Castro to seek a tighter alliance with the Soviet Union, thus creating a communist outpost a mere hundred miles from Florida. The next year, the Soviets tried to base nuclear weapons on the island, sparking the Cuban missile crisis that nearly led to war.
1. One of the CIA operatives trained for the Bay of Pigs, Virgilio Gonzalez (c. 1925–), later participated in the 1972 break-in at the Watergate complex that triggered the political scandal of the same name.
2. Castro had several of the Bay of Pigs invaders executed, and the rest were released to the United States several years later in exchange for food aid.
3. In the aftermath of the invasion, CIA director Allen Dulles (1893–1969) was forced to resign.
Feminist author and organizer Betty Friedan (1921–2006) sparked the modern women’s rights movement with the publication of her famous 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, which criticized the strictures placed on women in American society.
Betty Naomi Goldstein was born in Illinois. She graduated from Smith, a prestigious all-women’s college, in 1942, and briefly studied psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. She gave up her academic career, however, and married a New York theatrical producer, Carl Friedman, in 1947. He later dropped the m from their last name.
As a suburban housewife in the 1950s, Betty Friedan began to notice that many young mothers her age were despondent, despite their material prosperity. Raising children and keeping a neat home, to Friedan and many other women, proved stifling and unfulfilling. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan referred to this sense of creeping malaise as the “problem that has no name”:
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”
The book struck a nerve among millions of American women by giving voice to their frustrations, and it was a huge success. After its publication, Friedan would go on to help found the National Organization for Women (NOW, established in 1966) and several other feminist groups, lobbying against gender discrimination, unequal pay in the workplace, and restrictions on abortion.
1. As president of NOW, one of Friedan’s first projects was a compaign to stop airlines from requiring “stewardesses”—female flight attendants—to resign once they reached age thirty-two.
2. She divorced her husband in 1969.
3. In the 1970s, concerned by what she regarded as the growing radicalism of the feminist movement, Friedan split with her former allies, whom she dismissed as the “bra-burning, anti-man, politics-oforgasm school” of feminism.
The federal minimum wage, enacted in 1938, was one of the most important of the New Deal programs signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) during the Great Depression. The United States Congress approved the first minimum wage of 25 cents an hour only after rancorous debate; one Alabama newspaper predicted “chaos” and the “destruction” of the region’s economy if Southern textile factories were forced to raise their pay. As Roosevelt hoped, however, the minimum wage had an immediate impact on the American economy, raising the income level of about 750,000 workers while causing minimal job losses. Raised repeatedly in the seven decades since, the minimum wage is now widely considered one of the government’s fundamental economic guarantees to workers.
At the time the bill first passed, wages in the United States varied widely by region and industry. Southern textile mills were particularly notorious for their low hourly pay, while in other parts of the country, such as California, most workers already made more than 25 cents an hour. Roosevelt proposed the minimum wage law partly as a matter of simple economic fairness but also as a way to give consumers more money to pump back into the economy, which, in 1938, was still struggling to shake off the Depression.
The law that contained the minimum wage bill, the Fair Labor Standards Act, also introduced a slew of other worker protections, including a ban on child labor and a requirement that employers pay time-and-a-half wages for hours worked in excess of forty per week. Modified several times since its first passage, the minimum wage bill is one of the main legacies of the New Deal and continues to regulate how American workers are treated by their employers. The minimum wage reached $1 in 1956 and has been raised periodically over the years. Under legislation signed into law in 2007, the minimum wage went up to $5.85 and was scheduled to rise further in increments through 2009 to reach $7.25. In recent years, however, many individual states have raised the minimum wage beyond the federal minimum—replicating the regional imbalances that helped spur the passage of the act in the first place.
1. Challenged by employers, the constitutionality of the minimum wage law was upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1941.
2. Farm owners initially were exempt from the minimum wage, but protections for agricultural workers were added in the 1960s.
3. An exemption in the law allows restaurant owners to pay much lower wages to servers on the theory that they will make up the difference in tips.
In 1919, a young lieutenant colonel in the United States Army led a 3,251-mile expedition of eighty-one vehicles from Washington, DC, to San Francisco. The convoy, crawling across rough dirt roads, muddy trails, and barren deserts, completed its mission in what was then a record time for a transcontinental road trip: sixty-two days.
The officer was Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969). Thirty-five years later, as president of the United States, Eisenhower would ask the US Congress to create a system of modern, limited-access interstate freeways to replace the treacherous roads he remembered from his cross-country trip. Built at enormous expense, Eisenhower’s interstate highways would enable the growth of suburbs, slash driving times between the coasts, and change the way Americans travel.
Before Eisenhower signed the interstate legislation in 1956, the road network in the United States was a patchwork of state-constructed highways. The German autobahn system, which began being constructed in 1934 and had impressed Eisenhower during World War II (1939–1945), served as an inspiration for the new US federal system. “The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land,” Eisenhower later explained. To convince Congress to fund highway construction, Eisenhower and his allies in the automobile industry cast better roads as a national security project that would help the army move its convoys in the event of nuclear war.
Measuring 42,793 miles, the federal interstate highway system cost $114 billion over thirty-five years, making it by far the biggest public works project in the nation’s history. Eisenhower, along with many historians of his administration, considered the interstate system his greatest domestic accomplishment. However, critics complain that the interstate system destroyed cities by tearing apart downtowns and that the billions of federal dollars spent on roads amounted to a massive subsidy to the road-building and automobile industries. Nevertheless, the highway system was officially completed in 1991.
1. In 1990, the system was officially renamed the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways in recognition of the president’s role in creating the highways.
2. The interstate system is partially funded with the proceeds from a federal gas tax, which in 2007 was 18.4 cents per gallon.
3. Eisenhower signed the bill June 29, 1956, while at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recovering from intestinal surgery.
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) authored A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first Broadway play written by an African-American. The play quickly became a landmark in theater history and inspired a generation of black writers and thespians. In 1961, Raisin was also made into a successful movie starring Sidney Poitier (1927–), and later a musical. Sadly, Hansberry wrote only one more play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), before her death from cancer a few months shy of her thirty-fifth birthday.
A Raisin in the Sun, based on Hansberry’s own Chicago upbringing, follows the fortunes of a working-class African-American family, the Youngers, who unexpectedly receive a $10,000 insurance payout after the death of their father. Each member of the family has different dreams for what to do with the money, and the play largely follows the family’s fight over how to spend it.
The play’s evocative title takes its name from “Harlem,” a poem by Langston Hughes (1902–1967) that succinctly explains the Younger family’s predicament:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Although A Raisin in the Sun tells a timeless story, it is firmly rooted in the unique experiences of the post–World War II generation of African-Americans. For Hansberry’s generation, whose parents had moved out of the South during the great migration, a middle-class life finally seemed within reach—and with it, a whole new set of agonizing challenges and dilemmas.
More than forty years after the death of its author, A Raisin in the Sun remains one of the best-loved and most-performed modern American plays and was revived on Broadway in 2004.
1. Rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs (1969–) starred in the 2004 revival of Raisin. One unkind reviewer wrote that he acted “like a high school sophomore.”
2. Hansberry inspired the song “Young, Gifted and Black,” which has been recorded by Nina Simone (1933–2003) and Aretha Franklin (1942–).
3. Before Raisin, Hansberry had complained that most Broadway plays written by whites depicted African-Americans as one-dimensional “cardboard” characters.
Musical polymath Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) was the leading American classical music conductor and composer of the late twentieth century, renowned for his symphonies and leadership of the New York Philharmonic. In addition to his classical work, Bernstein wrote the musical West Side Story and dozens of other pieces of popular music for Broadway, making him one of the most versatile and successful American composers since George Gershwin (1898–1937).
Born in Massachusetts to a Ukrainian immigrant family, Bernstein was a piano prodigy at an early age. He graduated from Harvard in 1939 and then struggled to land a steady job in the music industry during World War II (1939–1945). He eventually won a position as an assistant conductor with the New York Philharmonic in 1943.
Like Gershwin, Bernstein was drawn to both the European classics and American popular music. As a conductor, he favored works by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), and Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), giants of the European classical tradition. Bernstein wrote two full-length symphonies, Symphony no. 1, Jeremiah (1944), and Symphony no. 2, The Age of Anxiety (1949).
Bernstein was no less adept at writing popular music, as exemplified by his Broadway musicals Peter Pan (1950), Candide (1956), and West Side Story (1957). He also scored On the Waterfront, the classic 1954 movie starring Marlon Brando (1924–2004). Fast becoming an international musical celebrity, Bernstein was officially put in charge of the New York Philharmonic in 1957.
A liberal Democrat who supported the civil rights movement and hired the Philharmonic’s first black member, violinist Sanford Allen, Bernstein was also a friend and backer of the Kennedy family. Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Bernstein wrote a Catholic Mass that was performed at the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington.
Enthusiastic and energetic on stage, Bernstein broke with many conventions as a conductor. He paced the stage, gesticulated wildly, and occasionally got so carried away by the music that he fell over during performances. Bernstein continued conducting until a few months before his death from smoking-related lung problems.
1. Bernstein was the first American to conduct at La Scala, the famed opera house in Milan, Italy.
2. He refused to accept an honor from the administration of George H. W. Bush (1924–) in 1989 in protest of what he regarded as government censorship of art exhibits dealing with the AIDS crisis.
3. On Christmas Day in 1989, Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—featuring the “Ode to Joy”—in Berlin to celebrate the demolition of the Berlin Wall.